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Atkins claimed that the key to the so-called "calorie fallacy" was that the
missing calories were explained by the excretion of ketones. Dieters in ketosis,
he argued, urinate and breathe out so many calories in the form of ketones that
"weight will be lost even when the calories taken in far exceed the calories
expended.” He claimed dieters could "sneak" calories out of the body unused.[107]

The "Atkins Physician Council" also claims that one’s body expends more
energy burning fat and thus "You wouldn't have to increase your exercise at all
because your body would be working harder, so that you could literally sit in
your armchair and lose weight."[108]
As the Secretary of the AMA’s Council on Food and Nutrition tried to make clear,
“The whole [Atkins] diet is so replete with errors woven together that it makes
the regimen sound mysterious and magical.”[109]

These claims sounded so far fetched that as part of an investigative
documentary, the BBC paid obesity researchers to design an experiment to test
it. So researchers took two identical twins and put one on the Atkins Diet for a
while, the other on a high carbohydrate diet and locked them both in sealed
chambers to measure exactly where the calories were going. Did the twin on the
Atkins Diet have any sort of metabolic "advantage" by burning fat and protein as
his source of fuel? Was he literally flushing more calories down the toilet? Of
course not. "We found no difference whatsoever," the researcher said.[110]

As the evidently "subnormal intellects" at the AMA concluded, "No scientific
evidence exists to suggest that the low carbohydrate ketogenic diet has a
metabolic advantage over more conventional diets for weight reduction."[111]
The only comprehensive systematic review ever done of low carb diets found that
the carbohydrate content of the diet seemed in no way correlated with weight
loss.[112] The truth seems
to be that nothing matters more than calories when it comes to weight loss.[113]

But what about all the scientific studies Dr. Atkins cited in his book to
back up his claims? Although his first book had essentially no citations, by the
final edition he listed over 300.[114]
Reviewing all of the studies on low carb diets, researchers concluded, "The
studies by Atkins to support his contentions were of limited duration, conducted
on a small number of people, lacked adequate controls and used ill-defined
diets."[115] Most
importantly, though, some of the very studies he cites actually refute exactly
what he’s claiming. And he accused the AMA of being “intellectually dishonest.”[116]

Of the few studies that did back up his claims, some had seriously
questionable validity[117]
and researchers could not replicate the findings of the rest.
[118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131,
132, 133, 134, 135]. One review of studies that have
defended Atkins claims concluded, "It turns out that when these data are
critically analyzed they are often found to be in error, and it’s therefore
impossible to accept the validity of the conclusions derived by the authors from
such erroneous data."[136]

People lost weight on low carb diets the way everybody loses weight on any
diet—by eating fewer calories.[137]

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